I find myself not
knowing where this review is going to go or what rating I'll give it.
So instead I shall just start by getting a few things off my chest,
discussing what I liked and disliked about it, then weigh up the pros
and cons at the end.

Firstly the saga is
written in diary form, with footnotes. Except on a Kindle they're
not footnotes, they're endnotes. Scrolling to them and back is so
much of a pain that I defy anyone to have the patience to do so.
Reading them all at the end makes them devoid of context. I don't
really see what they add to the experience.

The diary form itself
didn't work for me either, it became a grammatical nightmare with
tense changes left, right and centre. A true diary is unlikely to
contain dialogue or present tense narrative, but this does, alongside
various forms of past tense. I'm not a stickler for rules, but when
it becomes unnatural to read there's a problem.

So our central
character, Captain Might, a pompous, arrogant superhero who knows
he's the top dog. In itself that characterisation is fine, but throw
in misogynist and borderline racist into the equation and it becomes
hard to root for him, even when he faces life without his powers. In
fact it's fair to say he's not particularly humbled by his
experience, even late on.

There are some
genuinely brilliant moments, some great one liners and hilarious
action sequences, but the balance is off. The author tries too hard
to make every 4th word funny or every 3rd line
a zinger and in practice it just doesn't work. Every inanimate
object is given the full comedy simile treatment, it's not uncommon
to find half a dozen metaphors and similes in a single paragraph. By
that point the laughs begin to diminish and it becomes tricky to
follow the action.

The story concept
behind this book is worthwhile, a world full of superheroes, the
greatest superhero of them all stripped of his powers and forced to
fight without them, overcoming his own ego as well as the
super-villain. The execution though was all wrong for me, the diary
form detracted from the story, it took too long for him to lose his
powers and then he spent far too long moping around feeling sorry for
himself.

I wish I could give a
heartier recommendation of this book, it certainly has bags of
potential, but unfortunately most of it is unfulfilled.